It’s against the law to hold up a Seven-Eleven. But if you do it, and get caught, you still might get away with it. You could plea-bargain to a lesser charge and maybe get off with a suspended sentence. The prosecutor might bungle his case. Maybe the store owner won’t press charges. Maybe some irregularity in police procedure might spring you.
It is not against the law to oppose same-sex pseudomarriage or any other goal of Organized Sodomy. But it’s easier to get away with an armed robbery.
A football player tweets a discouraging word about the first “openly gay” player to be drafted by the NFL–and suddenly he’s suspended from his team–that is, stripped of his livelihood–pending “education” that will make his mind right.
Two guys lose their cable TV show, which was about buying and selling houses, when it becomes known that they don’t support imitation marriage. The CEO of Firefox gets driven out of his job because he supported Proposition 8, the referendum by which Californians, by a great majority, reserved marriage to a man and a woman only. This was the law of the state until the bad guys found a friendly judge to overturn the election. Now, although anyone was perfectly within his legal rights to vote for or contribute money to Proposition 8, it is certainly treated as a crime.
The fig leaf is this argument: “We’re not doing anything to limit freedom of speech; but speech does have consequences.”
OK, sure: you get a TV or radio show and the audience doesn’t tune you in, the network is within its rights to tune you out. You write a book that people think is horse manure, they’re not infringing on your rights by refusing to buy it.
Supposedly we are a nation of laws; and yet a whole new class of punishable crime has been created without benefit of a single word of legislation. The punishments have been imposed, and are being imposed. If you’re the only serious Christian baker or photographer or job printer in a city featuring many bakers, photographers, or job printers, you can bet your bottom dollar the “gays” will come looking for you: and then you will either have to take an active part in one of their imitation marriages, or they and their friends in the bureaucracy will destroy your business.
I would caution you not to let them catch you being a racist; but as we all know already, there is absolutely no way for any Caucasian human being to avoid a charge of racism.
Fascism. There is no other word to describe it. They can say they are not limiting free speech, but the end result is still the same. When someone is fined just for tweeting “OMG” and “horrible” something is seriously wrong in this country.
It’s not like we’re short of laws, is it? The Federal Register weighs almost 400 pounds. But the amount of behavior that can be punished, although it violates no law, is growing and growing–and always in the same direction, too.
Wait’ll the politics changes, and libs ‘n’ progs suddenly find themselves on the other end of all these fine new instruments of oppression they’ve created. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of goons.